This article originally appeared in the January-February 2001 issue of the Children's Advocate newsmagazine, published by Action Alliance for Children.

Child care champions 2000:

Their victories and how they won

It was one in the morning, an hour after the midnight deadline for ending the California legislative session September 4. Suddenly, on the Assembly floor, members of the legislature's Women's Caucus, with several male supporters, put their arms around each other and chanted, "Child care! Child care! Child care!"

Soon after, the Assembly passed a bill allocating $42 million for child care facilities, with a special "urgency clause" that meant it could be passed after the deadline. Senator Martha Escutia (D, Montebello) literally ran back to the Senate with the bill, which the Senate passed in the last minutes of its overtime session.

This was only the final moment of the Women's Caucus's extraordinary campaign for child care in the year 2000 legislative session, a campaign closely linked to the efforts of child care advocates outside the legislature.

When the dust settled, gains for child care included:

• $42 million for child care facilities
• $40 million to expand child care subsidies for low-income working families
• $15 million to improve "retention" of child care workers in state-subsidized programs
• A child care tax credit that's "refundable"—if families don't owe any taxes, the state will send them a check
• $33 million in cost-of-living increases for child care centers to partially make up for past years when they got none
• $3 million for expanding child care for migrant families.

In June, as the state budget was being worked out, Women's Caucus members declared that they wouldn't vote for any budget that didn't include a big increase for child care. After the budget passed with a $133 million "augmentation" for child care, Women's Caucus members stayed on the job to get the necessary legislation passed.

Meanwhile advocates outside the legislature were keeping up the pressure. The United Child Care Campaign's "Green Light Vigil for Child Care" on April 10 drew hundreds of providers, parents, and advocates to the Capitol from all over the state. The next day a coalition of women's organizations made child care a theme of their annual Women in Action Lobby Day. The Center for the Child Care Workforce collected personally written letters from child care workers and sent one to each legislator. In May, the United Child Care Campaign ran a one-day "preschool in the Capitol," where legislators were invited to come work with the children, then receive a "pay stub" showing how much child care workers earn for that amount of time.

Sen. Debra Bowen (D, Redondo Beach), last year's chair of the Women's Caucus, attended the Green Light Vigil and took a turn reading names of children on waiting lists for subsidized care. Although she had already decided the Women's Caucus should play an activist role, the Green Light Vigil "helped put child care on my radar screen as an important issue to work on this year," says Bowen.

Other Women's Caucus child care champions included Escutia, who had a baby during her term as senator, and Dion Aroner, whose Oakland/Berkeley district has been a center of child care advocacy. Support from the legislative leaders, Sen. John Burton (D, SF) and Assembly Speaker Robert Hertzberg (D, LA), was also important says Pat Dorman, publisher of the legislative newsletter On the Capitol Doorstep.

The support of the Children's Advocates Roundtable was also "really significant," says Donita Stromgren, legislative coordinator for the California Child Care Resource and Referral Network. The Roundtable made child care a priority issue and coordinated "collaborative efforts of groups that aren't primarily focused on child care, including Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, labor unions, faith-based organizations," and others.

This year child care advocates will continue to push for

• Creating a statewide "master plan" for early childhood care and education
• Expanding the subsidy program so that every family that qualifies gets help paying for child care
• Increasing the pay of child care workers, currently so low that it is harming both the quality and the availability of child care.

—Jean Tepperman